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Opportunities, roadblocks for cannabis as Colo. agricultural crop

Different challenges for large medical/recreational growers, small medical-only caregivers

By Jenni Grubbs

Times Staff Writer

Posted:
02/24/2014 11:36:14 AM MST

Cannabis plants being grown for both medical and recreational marijuana crops take 120 days to reach harvesting readiness. Here, BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center co-owner Cheri Hackett stands Feb. 15 with some of the plants that are almost ready for harvest at a growing area at the back of her Northglenn combined medical pot dispensary and retail recreational marijuana store. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Flowering marijuana plants grow in a small greenhouse in rural Washington County southwest of Akron. James Clark serves as caregiver for medical marijuana patients and grows a limited number of plants for them. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Colorado is at the forefront of a big agricultural, economic and cultural experiment: legalizing marijuana.

Legalized medical marijuana is not really news at this point, but the legalization of growing, processing and selling the plant for more than just medical purposes certainly still is a big, evolving story.

The latest experiment is well underway, and some of the growers who started producing the plants for medical purposes and selling it and related products in dispensaries as "caregivers" for "patients" now have been allowed to establish recreational retail stores for similar products to sell to anyone older than 21 — in limited quantities.

These stores are part of the latest phase of the experiment, and there is still much to be determined from legal standpoints, including financial handling,

Paradigm shift

While agriculture is typically seen as a rural thing, legalized marijuana growing is thriving in some, but not all, urban areas of Colorado, all while most rural areas appear to be resisting the crop's incursion for a wide range of reasons.

For Cheri and Robin Hackett at BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center in Northglenn, adding a recreational store and separate grow facility to their existing medical dispensary and expanding their indoor farm when it became legal was a no-brainer.

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The Adams County and Northglenn municipal governments, as well as the state, granted the sisters, already existing medical dispensary license holders for BotanaCare, the separate recreational retail licenses that allowed them to set up and operate a retail store for recreational goods available to adults over 21 years old in limited quantities, as per Colorado's Amendment 64.

For caregiver and small-scale grower James Clark in rural Washington County, it has not been such a simple process.

As soon as they become viable, baby cloned marijuana plants being grown at BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center in Northglenn are repotted and tagged as either for medical or recreational purposes. They then start the "vegging" process so they can grow and mature, according to BotanaCare co-owner Cheri Hackett. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Not long after Colorado legalized medical marijuana and started setting up rules and regulations for caregivers and dispensaries, Clark sought to set up a medical marijuana dispensary to serve more than 400 red-card-holding patients in northeast Colorado who sought him out as a possible caregiver.

But after the Washington County Board of Commissioners issued a ban on such facilities about four years ago, Clark was only able to provide care for a fraction of those people and was limited in being able to develop products, such as edibles, that would not mean patients having to smoke the plant for their treatment.

He currently grows and provides medical marijuana to around 40 people. Clark said he owns the water rights for what he needs for irrigating the plants.

These cannabis plants, shown here Feb. 15, are in the final stage of "vegging" before the "bud tenders" transfer them to larger pots and another room at BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center in Northglenn with higher-powered grow lights to help them continue maturing, according to co-owner Cheri Hackett. Every inch of the grow facility is covered by surveillance cameras, and their feeds can be accessed remotely by state marijuana enforcement officials, she said. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Small-scale growing

Clark's cannabis grow processes are not that much different from those of a larger facility, like BotanaCare.

He uses grow lights and organic fertilizers, cloning baby plants, vegging them and then moving them to stronger lights to mature before harvest. He keeps the male and female plants segregated and raises the strains of cannabis that his patients want.

But with the size of his operation, he does this with a few volunteers in one small greenhouse, not a big warehouse with lots of employees and room after room after room for the various stages of growing the plants.

However, just like with any crop, every farmer has his or her own preferred methods and secrets.

And even with all the state oversight and monitoring, there still are some proprietary aspects of the legalized cannabis growing industry.

As a caregiver, the strains of plants he grows are directly related to the needs of his patients, Clark said.

"I grow a special strain of White Widow that offers pain relief for women with fibromyalgia," he said, adding that he wanted to develop edibles with that strain "with the specific right amounts of THC or no THC" to meet the individual patient's needs.

"I think there's going to be a big push for hemp in the medical community because it does not have THC," he said.

BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center's "bud tenders" use this white board to keep track of where the plants are in the growth cycle and what types of care and treatments they need from hour to hour, day to day, week to week, etc., according to co-owner Cheri Hackett, shown here Feb. 15. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

Still, Clark said he welcomes anyone from law enforcement or the state to his facility. He wants to make sure he's staying within the rules, too, since there still are federal laws that say the whole thing is illegal.

He wants to be able to continue to provide the medicine that his patients, many of them elderly, need for treating cancer-medicine-induced nausea, pain from a host of debilitating diseases and the various other ailments allowed under Amendment 20.

Clark also is looking at possibly expanding to opening a dispensary and/or retail store and grow operation in Log Lane Village, but that is still a ways off from becoming a reality. Still, he has already started working with iComply, a private company based in Colorado Springs that helps make sure those in the marijuana industry are complying with all state rules and regulations and not venturing into trouble with the federal government.

"For me, this started out and was always about caregiving," he said. "We've already had the people as patients," so why not continue to serve them in that larger capacity, he thought, going back to what he sought to do in the first place. "The whole money thing is great, but for us it's really been about caregiving. For the 10 years, if we had been about the money, we'd have the money now."

Family businesses

Caregiving is a large part of the Hackett sisters' mission, too, but the expansion into the recreational side is quickly proving to be extremely lucrative.

BotanaCare is their family business, but it is just one of the businesses they have been in together.

Previously, they were in the iron and steel industry and were involved in the construction using those materials at the original Mile High Stadium, Coors Field, the Colorado Convention Center and Denver International Airport, among other projects, Cheri said.

She said that her family had been Colorado pioneers who "got here for the gold rush, and now the bud rush."

But when construction on large projects slowed down early in the new century, they found a new growth industry: medical marijuana.

This was something near and dear to Robin's heart. She has some medical ailments that cause her debilitating pain, and the prescription medicines doctors gave her to treat it left her with kidney and liver problems and still lots of pain, she said.

Medical marijuana was her way to kick the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or nsaids, and the opiates and just function, Robin said.

Large-scale growing

The sisters have built a thriving business out of their dispensary and agricultural cannabis operation, now expanding into growing for the recreational store and trying to keep up with demand while still staying within growing limits set by the state.

Their growing facility is at the back of their Northglenn warehouse right on west side of Interstate 25. The warehouse has high ceilings that make venting the heat the grow lights produce easier, and the warehouse has room for them to expand three-fold, if the state allows it, Cheri said.

They employ workers on the growing side who they call "bud tenders," as well as people to process, package, roll, sort, sell, do patient intake, maintain patient files, deal with all the state and local reports and handle everything else that goes with running multiple businesses that have to be separate but are still heavily entwined.

Growing the plants indoors with lighting systems is important for producing marijuana crops, Cheri said.

That would be OK if they were growing hemp, rather than marijuana, which is ruined as a crop if it gets fertilized by the male plants.

"It turns to stems and seeds," she said. "That's why we grow indoors. We can control it. Outside grows grow 10 times better, but we can't control it."

She said that outdoor growers in the mountains have less problems with this due to a greater number of other trees and plants that keep the pollination from the male cannabis plants more at bay.

The BotanaCare grow operation uses the fertilizing chemicals that the state says are allowed, Cheri said.

"All of our chemicals that we use on the plant get flushed out through the roots," she said. "We put that outside on the dirt, and it's like fertilizing our lawn. There's harsher chemicals used in lawn fertilizer than what we put on this plant. None of it really goes down the drain."

The regulation of the chemicals that can be used as fertilizer on the plant is due to its intention as a medical product, she said.

The current grow operation at BotanaCare uses "probably a couple hundred gallons of water a day" on the medical side, and about the same or a little more on the recreational side, Cheri said.

"I'm planting more recreational," she said. "I'm expanding to keep up with recreational demand.

Growing cycle

Every 120 days, they have a new crop, and each plant is monitored on multiple levels "from seed to sale," Cheri said. "Everything is tagged," with blue tags identifying a plant as for recreational purposes and yellow ones signaling a medical plant.

"Every two weeks we harvest," she said. "We're trying to get it to once a week harvest."

The plants start out as root clipping and are cloned into baby plants. From there, they go under increasing levels of light while "vegging" and growing, Cheri explained.

"Slowly, we moved them into a higher level of light so not to burn the plant," she said.

Such grow operations typically are potted not in dirt, but in coconut husk materials or hydro, using water and lava rocks, Cheri said, but some people do use dirt.

"Everyone has different opinions on how to grow it best," she said.

BotanaCare has a separate room for flowering plants with far stronger lights. The smell from the plants is stronger in there, too.

One of the later processes is flushing the plants with pure water, with the city water's chlorine filtered out, to "flush all the nutrients out of the plants," she said.

Currently, much of the plant winds up wasted, with only the parts of it that produce the drug being used for the smokable product or for making edibles, creams and other products, both medical and recreational.

Limited growth

While business may be booming, Cheri knows that there are limits in how far her business can expand.

"My licenses allow me to grow 3,600 recreational and 1,800 medical plants," Cheri explained, with the recreational the double of the medical, which is directly related to the number of patients — 360 — the BotanaCare dispensary is allowed to serve.

She said she would like to expand up in the level of licenses she has from the state so she could grow more to meet demand.

"I'm still looking to grow us because we're seeing high volumes of recreational clients," Cheri said. "We could do more if we could sell more."

Like most retail stores, the BotanaCare recreational facility limits customers to buying a quarter ounce at a time "to keep up and control volume" so that they do not run out of product.

"The fact that people voted and they want it, they're coming out to prove it," Cheri said.

While business has naturally slowed from the booming first week, it is still steady, she said.

She said another thing that limits potential growth is the lack of open markets between the growing number of states that allow medical marijuana and now the two states with legalized recreational marijuana.

The conflicts between state and federal laws play into this, as moving the product from state to state takes even further into federal territory, where the plants remain illegal.

"One thing that needs changed is cannabis needs to be taken off the schedule 1 drug list," Cheri said. "If they move that to a schedule 4 o 5, it changes everything, including banking. This affects all the traders, not just the growers. I understand why the banking doesn't want it. We could change our whole economy just by changing it to not a schedule 1 drug."

While the Obama administration announced some guidelines for banks that would do business with marijuana establishments in states that legalized it, banks still are subject to federal laws that make even those relaxed guidelines still full of onerous paperwork and far too many ways to fun afoul and wind up with seized assets and potential prosecution for participation in drug trafficking, money laundering or racketeering just for processing financial transactions or offering bank accounts to marijuana businesses.

Also at question is the hemp market, which is just in its beginning stage after decades of being banned as a crop.

Something that could help, though, she said, is when the state will allow "decoupling," which means that licensed facilities could sell plants wholesale to each other. That is supposed to go into effect in July, she said.

"That's going to make it great for those farmers," she said.

Financials

Retail marijuana definitely has the prospect of being lucrative for the state.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper recently announced budget projections with larger-than-expected sales tax revenue leading to bigger spending on the youth prevention, substance abuse treatment and other related programs.

Cheri said she experiences that larger level of sales tax revenue being collected every day.

"We're comparable to one of the big box stores," she said.

BotanaCare is one of three dispensary/store combos in Adams County.

Log Lane Village soon could have similar facilities, as that little town's board of trustees recently voted to allow licensing of up to three medical marijuana dispensaries and three recreational retail pot stores. The town ordinance also allows for related grow operations and facilities to produce related products, like edibles.

Clark would like to become one of those license holders in Log Lane, but he is waiting to see what happens.

But he said he faces issues with finding available property in the town, as well as other challenges.

"We're going to stay on the sidelines, but we've got our letter of intent to file for an application in," he said. "We're going to have to pray to Jesus and hope to be able to do this. It's our life savings on the line."

Multi-faceted plant

Cheri Hackett and James Clark both are passionate about cannabis plants and their qualities.

"Because of it being the type of plant it is, it rejuvenates the land," Cheri said.

And she sees lots of potential uses for this in agriculture with growing hemp becoming legal, as well as with marijuana legalization.

"Farmers can do corn and hemp and rotate it through," she said. "You don't have to leave the land fallow. This crop revitalizes the land and puts nutrients back in it. The properties of hemp are phenomenal."

She said she also has learned "a lot about the plant's overall health properties" along with all of the related farming knowledge she has gained.

Clark and Cheri Hackett both want to see lots more research be done into the plant.

Cheri said she is working with the University of Denver on seeking a research grant.

And both BotanaCare and Clark do product development for their medical patients.

And Clark said he wants to see more hemp being produced in Colorado, as it is a dryland crop that would not need the water that corn does.

Cannabis plants mature under the lights in the BotanaCare Medical Cannabis Center grow facility, shown here Feb. 15, in Northglenn. The high ceilings in the facility help the excess heat from the lights get sucked out by the ventilation system. The plants are separated by where they are in the 120-day grow cycle. BotanaCare co-owner Cheri Hackett said she expects to need to triple the size of the grow operation to keep up with demand for recreational marijuana, which Amendment 64 made legal for adults over 21 to purchase in limited quantities in Colorado, and for previously licensed medical dispensary and now licensed retail store owners, such as Hackett to grow, but in highly regulated and state-monitored quantities. (Jenni Grubbs / Fort Morgan Times)

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